Elise DeChard

Elise DeChard is an artist / architectural designer based in Detroit / New York whose work explores the possibilities inherent in our cities and the use of playful and subversive techniques to transcend the traditional urban experience. Investigating the intersections between tactility and fragility, her work challenges the viewer to reconsider the fundamental stability of our physical environment. In pursuit of an idea of transformational reuse, her work aims to bring new Frankenstinian life to reclaimed detritus, as a challenge to the current pervasive politic of superficial reuse. Throughout all of these explorations underlies a striving towards a humanization of architecture through textural allure, interactivity, and ephemerality to create space which transcends mere container to become affective, emotional, embodied.

A voracious traveller, Elise is constantly wandering all over the world, investigating vernacular building technologies and contemporary urban trends and doing various design projects along the way. She received her BArch from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, exploring the accumulation of history on the surfaces of our cities and techniques to read and reveal these layers of space and time through her thesis Residual Library: Exploration and Documentation of History Through Decay. Elise is currently pursuing a Masters of Architecture at Cranbrook Academy of Art.

2016 and 2018 Participant